Developmental Psychology

Category archives for Developmental Psychology

In last week’s Science, Dosenbach et al describe a set of sophisticated machine learning techniques they’ve used to predict age from the way that hemodynamics correlate both within and across various functional networks in the brain. As described over at the BungeLab Blog, and at Neuroskeptic, the classification is amazingly accurate, generalizes easily to two…

Two seemingly contradictory trends characterize brain development during childhood and adolescence: Diffuse to focal: a shift from relatively diffuse recruitment of neural regions to more focal and specific patterns of activity, whether in terms of the number of regions recruited, or the magnitude or spatial extent of that recruitment Local to distributed: a shift in…

How can we enhance perception, learning, memory, and cognitive control? Any answer to this question will require a better understanding of the way they are best enhanced: through cognitive change in early development. But we can’t stop there. We also want to know more about the neural substrates that enable and reflect these cognitive transformations…

A nice 2010 Human Brain Mapping paper by Church, Petersen & Schlaggar covers a number of interpretational issues confronting modern neuroimaging. Their particular application is pediatric neuroimaging (I will also use developmental examples), but the general issues apply to nearly all fMRI studies. So here are some important things to keep in mind whenever you…

A 2010 FINS paper from Cohen et al. demonstrates that multivariate patterns in neural recruitment during response inhibition across the brain are significantly predictive of response inhibition ability and age of the scanned subject, and shows that other factors (such as response variability and reaction times) cannot be similarly predicted from the same data.

I’ve been busy writing up a new paper, and expect the reviews back on another soon, so … sorry for the lack of posts. But this should be of interest: The Dana Foundation has just posted an interview with Terrence Sejnowki about his recent Science paper, “Foundations for a New Science of Learning” (with coauthors…

Synaesthesia refers to the phenomenon where certain perceptual stimuli induce an unrelated and illusory perception – for example, a digit-color synaesthete may experience a sensation of the color green whenever exposed to the number 3. The relationships between the inducers and the induced synaesthetic experience are widely considered random; one anecodotal explanation is that letter-color…

There’s little evidence that “staging” the training of neural networks on language-like input – feeding them part of the problem space initially, and scaling that up as they learn – confers any consistent benefit in terms of their long term learning (as reviewed yesterday). To summarize that post, early computational demonstrations of the importance of…

The ability to suppress unwanted thoughts and actions is thought (by some) to be crucial in your ability to control behavior. However, alternative perspectives suggest that this emphasis on suppression or “inhibition” is misplaced. These perspectives, largely motivated by computational models of the brain, suggest that alternative abilities (such as the activation or “active maintenance”…